I sent a lot of the people who read this a letter from this website: Save the Internet. Because of the nature of this issue, it's natural that you may not have heard about it, but the bottom line is this:

The Internet as we know it is in danger. That sounds melodramatic, but it's true.

Large telecomm companies have always had to abide by something called "The Internet First Amendment," which essentially means that no matter where data comes from, it must be treated equally. So, if your Internet access is provided by Comcast, and you type into your browswer that you want to go to www.myspace.com, Comcast is required to give that request the same priority as another user's request to go to www.comcast.net, even though one site is owned by News Corporation and the other is owned by your ISP. Likewise, if you have AOL as your Internet provider, which is affiliated with Time Warner, and you want to go to www.google.com, your request gets the same priority as someone who wants to go to www.aol.com.

This is what's known as "network neutrality." It gives you the freedom to go anywhere you want, with the only limitation being the amount of bandwidth you have paid for. Hotmail (owned by MSN) loads at the same speed as AOL, if both pages are the same size. The same amount of data sent by Google and Yahoo! arrives at the same speed.

What the large telecomm companies want to do is charge content providers to assign higher priorities to certain data, and "de-prioritizing" other data. Or blocking it entirely.

What that means is if (hypothetically) Comcast wants to promote Napster or Rhapsody as its preferred music service, it may reduce the priority that sites like iTunes have. The net result would be, if you want to download a song off of iTunes, it may take you twice as long as the same song on Rhapsody. And that nifty little iPod you paid for suddenly becomes a lot less useful.

This blog, dumb as it may be, could suddenly become more difficult to reach.

If you have a small business, or advertise on the web, the value of your web space will go down, or the cost to maintain it will go up.

Imagine a world where what car you drive determines which streets you can use. Which stores you can visit. If you look at this from the perspective of capitalizing on an investment (which is certainly the outlook of large media and telecomm companies), it makes sense. But if you take it from the perspective of the users, and the way it changes the landscape, it's just not fair.

So write your Congressman. Sign a petition. Tell your friends. Save the Internet.

hey little fella, how are you doing today?: angry
soundtrack: Gemma Hayes - Time After Time